Why I walked away from Your Party
Adnan Hussain, Independent MP for Blackburn, addressing a pro-Palestine demonstration, September 2024 (Credit: David Tramontan/SOPA Images/Sipa USA / Alamy Live News)
4 min read
There were the factional disputes and serious concerns over organisational conduct and governance, of course.
But I also left ‘Your Party’ last month because of something more fundamental: an increasingly rigid ideological culture that insists socially conservative values have no place in a left-wing movement.
As someone shaped by working class, immigrant, northern life, that was not a position I could intellectually accept or morally concede. My grandfather came to Lancashire in the 1950s, to a mill town on the outskirts of Burnley. The skyline was defined by chimneys; the streets were held together by graft. Three generations later, my family is economically secure, very educated and deeply rooted in British life.
My own political journey mirrors the very social mobility the left claims to champion. That is why the assertion that people like me have “no space” in a socialist party strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of the British working class.
I was elected not through party machinery or metropolitan networks but through grassroots organising in one of the most deprived communities in the country. I unseated Labour in what was a stronghold of theirs because I listened to locals who had long felt neglected by the mainstream, two-party system. I understood their anxieties, their loyalties, their values – and their anger.
Yet during my involvement in the formation of ‘Your Party’, I found myself being lectured by individuals with far less connection to Britain’s working class than I could ever discard. To be told that I was unfit to represent working-class voices because I introduced a conversation about social conservatism and the left was absurd and insulting.
The problem is ideological absolutism masquerading as progressive principle. There is a strain of thought on the left that sees socially conservative views as a pathology to be corrected. It is rooted in an assumption: improve someone’s economic conditions and their social attitudes will, inevitably, liberalise. This is historically, sociologically and politically illiterate. Human beings are not economic widgets. People hold on to traditions, beliefs and identities because they are meaningful, not because they are materially convenient.
When the left insists that working-class people must relinquish their cultural or religious attachments to be politically acceptable, it reproduces a form of liberal paternalism every bit as condescending as the attitudes it claims to oppose. It tells communities already scarred by deindustrialisation and abandonment that their values are a problem to be solved, not experiences to be understood.
This vacuum, created by the left's refusal to engage authentically with working-class social conservatism, is being exploited by actors who do not have these communities’ best interests at heart. The far right and wealthy online disruptors are able to make people feel seen. That should trouble all those who claim to care. And how did such actors gain influence in the first place? Years of neglect by the left of these very communities.
My commitment as an MP is simple: represent my constituents as they are, not as theory demands they should be. And this is where, after my experience with the dogmatic, restrictive culture involved in creating a new political party on the left, independence has become not a compromise but a necessity.
The political landscape of modern Britain defies the old binaries. Left and right are no longer sufficient co-ordinates for navigating the complexity of today’s social, economic and cultural terrain. Solutions must come from wherever they are found: sometimes from the left; sometimes the right; always from the lived realities of the people I serve.
A successful movement on the left with mass electoral appeal will be one that listens, allows difficult conversations and respects faith, culture and tradition while relentlessly pursuing economic justice. A left that lifts people up without demanding they leave themselves behind. That is the only left worth building, and the only politics worth practising.
Ahead of the Your Party founding conference this weekend, I wish my dear colleagues, those who have worked tirelessly on the Your Party project, the very best of luck. I hope the party is ultimately able to become what it initially promised: an inclusive, hopeful, pluralistic movement capable of bringing people together rather than driving them apart.
Meanwhile, I hope to represent my working-class constituency of Blackburn as an Independent – free of both party and ideological restrictions.
Adnan Hussain is the Independent MP for Blackburn
